Contact: Jerry Horn, Priests for Life, 540-220-0095

ATLANTA, Sept. 23 /Christian Newswire/ -- Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, along with Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Pastoral Associate of Priests for Life, issued the following statement today in response to concerns that the description of abortion as a "holocaust" trivializes what happened to our Jewish brothers and sisters:

"Approximately 50 million human beings have been killed in the United States since Roe v. Wade permitted abortion throughout pregnancy.  Children have been torn limb from limb by surgical forceps and killed with suction tubes - not because of anything they did, but just because they existed.

"If abortion isn't a holocaust, we need to rewrite every dictionary.

"Periodically, protests arise when someone links the term 'holocaust' to abortion.  The National Director of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, finds former Governor Mike Huckabee's reference to the 'holocaust of liberalized abortion' to be offensive.  He writes that the Holocaust was a 'unique tragedy in human history.'

"With all due respect to Mr. Foxman and others who recoil at the use of the word holocaust to describe abortion, a clarification is in order.

"The term 'the Holocaust' refers to the slaughter of six million Jews by Hitler's Germany.  The proper noun attached to this horrific period, however, does not preempt the use of the word in its common meaning to describe the killing of a million Rwandans, over one million Armenians, or two million Cambodians; neither does it prevent its use in describing the killing of 50 million Americans.

"Abortion is a holocaust that has taken and continues to take more human lives than any holocaust in human history.  We are deeply concerned at how easily so many people trivialize this slaughter of the unborn, especially since it hasn't yet stopped."

Priests for Life is the nation's largest Catholic pro-life organization dedicated to ending abortion and euthanasia. For more information, visit www.priestsforlife.org.